Michael W. Hickson

Pierre Bayle’s 1686-88 Commentaire philosophique (CP) is widely recognized as one of the first and most radical pleas for universal religious toleration in the West (Zagorin 2003, 240-88). It also has a reputation for being a notoriously difficult text to interpret. The main interpretive issue with the CP is that the second part (CP II) seems to undermine the first part (CP I) entirely: what begins as the work of a Rationalist seems to end as the work of a Skeptic. After demonstrating the immorality of persecution, the work goes on to demonstrate that any person who is sincerely convinced they must persecute indeed has the moral obligation to persecute. The article explores two approaches that aim to address the interpretative paradoxes present in this text by Bayle, advocating for an intermediate position between the Paradoxical and Coherent readings.

In this paper I first sketch José R. Maia Neto’s case that Bayle was an Academic sceptic and Thomas Lennon’s case that this reading helps to explain the Bayle enigma. Then I raise several problems for the Academic interpretation of Bayle as it has thus far been presented by these two authors. I will then expand and defend the Academic sceptical interpretation of Bayle by applying it to the particular case of Bayle’s most controversial philosophical work, the Continuation des pensées diverses sur la comète (CPD), of 1705. It is on the basis of this work that Gianluca Mori rested the bulk of his atheistic interpretation of Bayle, which has been in turn the starting point of much of the Bayle scholarship of the past decade. My thesis is that the CPD is a work of Academic scepticism, that Bayle himself invites this interpretation early in the CPD, and that this interpretation both undermines Mori’s atheistic reading of the work, while also explaining that reading’s plausibility.

In this essay I argue that chess is not a game.?I begin by arguing the narrower point that chess is not a game in the sense of 'game' developed by Bernard Suits.?Chess is not a Suitsian game because chess lacks a prelusory goal.?Chess lacks a prelusory goal, which is a goal that is identifiable before a game is played, because no checkmate position is knowably achievable before chess is played.?Checkmate is a postlusory discovery about chess, not a prelusory goal of chess, and chess consequently has more in common with mathematics and physics than it has in common with darts, sprints, and lawn bowling. Various objections are answered.

Did Bayle write the Avis aux réfugiés? Although the long debate over this question might not be over, we are convinced that strong probability supports Gianluca Mori's position that Bayle was indeed its sole author. We are also convinced, however, that the significance that Mori assigns to Bayle's authorship gets it exactly the wrong way around, for while Mori is right that the Avis is not only consistent but also representative of the views espoused by Bayle in his subsequent work (indeed, as we see it, throughout all his work), those views are not, as Mori claims, intended to be subversive of Christianity, indeed, of all religion, but supportive of it.

Pierre Bayle’s theory of religious toleration has received much attention over the past three centuries, yet there is still little consensus surrounding the precise logic of Bayle’s argument, and even less consensus concerning whether that argument is successful or perhaps utterly inconsistent. One of the central themes in the literature concerns the role of skepticism in Bayle’s argument for toleration. Some argue that Baylean toleration is based entirely in a non-skeptical morality that is in turn based in conscience, while others argue that Baylean toleration requires a foundation of skeptical doubt. In this paper I will offer an interpretation of Bayle’s argument for toleration as it is offered in the Ninth Letter of the Nouvelles lettres critiques (1685), and I will show that skepticism plays an essential role in the argument.

In this paper I uncover and critically analyze a methodological assumption in the literature on conscientious refusals in health care. The assumption is what I call the “Priority of Conscience Principle,” which says the following: to determine the moral status of any act of conscientious refusal, it is first necessary to determine the nature and value of conscience. I argue that it is not always necessary to discuss conscience in the debate on conscientious refusals, and that discussing conscience is even problematic, since it can lead authors to beg the question.

In this paper I uncover the identities of the interlocutors of Pierre Bayle's Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste, and I show the significance of these identities for a proper understanding of the Entretiens and of Bayle's thought more generally. Maxime and Themiste represent the philosophers of late antiquity, Maximus of Tyre and Themistius. Bayle brought these philosophers into dialogue in order to suggest that the problem of evil, though insoluble by means of speculative reason, could be dissolved and thus avoided through mutual toleration. I conclude by comparing Bayle's "theodicy of toleration" with Kant's notion of authentic theodicy.